Howto convert MPC, Flac and Ogg to mp3 on Linux with free tools

In my MP3 library’s past I had experimented with different file formats. I have recordings of vinyl or radio in FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), MPC (Musepack), Ogg (Ogg Vorbis) and other, extracted audio tracks from DVB-recordings on my PC. But since my car’s radio, my phone and my DVD player don’t support those formats (Nokias N900 did!), I chose to convert them to MP3. I made three little bash scripts, that probably only prove my limited coding capabilities…🙂

Nevertheless, these little snippets are quite handy for me, and yes, I do know there are better solutions around, but that simply works for me. For security reasons, the source files are not deleted, but moved to a new subdirectory. The final “ls” creates a playlist in the working directory.

Next thing will be extracting the audio track from 3GP files, like ancient mobile phones used to record. As far as i read up to now, Mplayer or its partner mencoder should be able to do that, e.g. for videos with